Kitabı oku: «Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life», sayfa 8

Ted annoyed Hobsbaum’s Rhodesian landlady by cooking a black pudding in her frying pan and singing ballads in the small hours of the morning, cajoling a shy, plain schoolteacher poet called Rosemary Joseph to join in. Rosemary later had a poem called ‘Baking Day’ published in an anthology of the work of the Group.15 Hobsbaum believed that Ted portrayed her, with a change of profession though not of character, in the poem that was entitled ‘Secretary’ in his first book, The Hawk in the Rain.

‘Secretary’ first appeared, untitled, in Saint Botolph’s Review. It is a cruel little poem about a nervous, demure young woman who would ‘shriek’ and run off in tears if touched by a man. Hughes imagines her scuttling ‘down the gauntlet of lust / Like a clockwork mouse’, darning and cooking for her family, then going to bed early with buttocks clenched tight against the force of youth and desire.16 Hobsbaum’s identification of this despised virgin with Rosemary Joseph should be treated with caution. As a student of F. R. Leavis, he should have remembered that one of the first lessons of practical criticism was to distinguish the speaker in a poem – the written ‘I’ – from the poet himself. The reader’s business is to attend to the words on the page, to judge the authenticity of the feeling created by the verbal tone, the cadence and texture of the verse, not to suppose that the poem is a crude transcription of the writer’s personal experience. Furthermore, as T. S. Eliot taught, all poems are as much engagements with previous poems, with the literary ‘tradition’, as they are expressions of the self. Hughes’s ‘Secretary’ may have had one seed in his observation of a particular woman, or kind of woman, but it was also his reworking of the typist in her bedsit passively surrendering to the ‘young man carbuncular’ in Eliot’s The Waste Land.

By the summer of 1955, Ted had broken up with Liz and was going out with a girl called Shirley who was reading English at Newnham. She was beautiful and clever, stronger and more interesting than Liz, though shy and quietly spoken. They were serious about each other. When she appeared leaning over the railings of the Mill bridge, Ted would leave his friends in the Anchor and go off with her.

Shirley was in her second year. She came from a suburban background in the north-west (her parents were both pharmacists), and had been to a mixed grammar school. At first she had been overawed by Cambridge, and most particularly by what seemed to her the supreme self-confidence of her fellow-undergraduates. Nevertheless, during her first year she had found some true friends at Newnham and come to feel more at ease.

What attracted Shirley to Ted initially was his unorthodox lifestyle, his residence in the orchard of St Botolph’s Rectory, his poetry, his snatches of French picked up over his Paris summer the previous year (‘Zut, alors,’ he would say), his trademark black corduroy jacket – all part of a bohemian persona. He fried herrings in oatmeal for her; he taught her a betting system based on the form of three-year-old racehorses. He seemed rooted in reality – the antithesis of the rarefied and cerebral atmosphere of Cambridge. He made the conventionally ambitious men pale into insignificance. But what made her fall deeply in love with him was an intensity, a power, a sense of certainty, of sureness. He had a stillness, a watchfulness about him – not the watchfulness of a detached analytic observer; he was empathetic, he engaged with the world, but always retained an immutable inner ‘self’. This, it seemed to her, encompassed but was more than his belief in his vocation as a poet. She thought it had been with him always. She grew to feel she had become part of that certainty, that ‘self’. Later, when she had to accept that this was no longer true, the effect was devastating.

With her auburn hair and pale freckled skin, she was his Deirdre of the Sorrows, his ethereal Celtic girl. In the warm summer of 1955, Shirley stayed up for the Long Vacation term. She had a lovely room looking out on Newnham greenery. Ted came over from his gardening job, bearing armfuls of roses. He invited her to the Beacon for a week. She found his father quiet and withdrawn, his mother warm and properly maternal: she made them real homemade lemonade. While there, Shirley, in his mother’s absence, made a disastrous attempt to cook Scotch eggs and left the kitchen a blackened mess. She feared that Ted’s house-proud mother would be enraged, but Edith just laughed it off. Olwyn then arrived from Paris for a brief visit. Like Ted, she towered over her parents. Shirley felt more than a little intimidated by this striking, blonde Viking goddess. Olwyn shook her hand, turned it over, examined her palm and said: ‘You have some very nasty moments coming.’ Shirley was chilled by an antagonism she could not understand. When she and Olwyn had to share a bed, Shirley balanced herself precariously on the extreme edge for the whole night.

It was in his West Yorkshire home that Ted revealed his detailed knowledge of and passionate love for the natural world. He was truly himself there. When he took Shirley to Haworth Parsonage, she, who had always loved Wuthering Heights, felt that Ted, like Heathcliff, belonged to these moors. He himself was part of that landscape, elemental, unchangeable.

From Yorkshire they went over to Liverpool. Shirley’s mother met them at the barrier at Lime Street station. They were both dressed in black, the uniform of rebellious youth. Her mother was shocked by Shirley’s appearance, and said: ‘You look as though you haven’t slept for a week.’ Shirley, of course, was secretly gratified by the remark. As they went down the avenue to her home, her mother walked a few paces ahead of them, not wanting the neighbours to associate her with this disreputable-looking pair. Shirley’s father was not impressed with Ted’s aspirations to be a poet. ‘I suppose you would go out to work,’ he said to his daughter, ‘and he would stay at home writing poetry.’ The following morning, Shirley, still in her nightdress, went into the guest room to bid Ted good morning. Her father saw her emerging, and Ted was asked to leave.

At the beginning of the Michaelmas term, Ted made a proposal: why didn’t she leave Cambridge and everything else behind her and go to Spain with him? She was not quite enough of a bohemian to agree. Later in life she was to wonder how all their lives would have turned out if she had gone, but she also convinced herself that what was about to happen was meant to be – it would lead to the magnificent poetry of both Ted and Sylvia.

As for Shirley’s appearance, Ted never forgot it. In an exquisite unpublished poem, the threads of memory are woven out of the ‘bushed mass’ of Shirley’s densely tangled hair that overwhelmed her ‘small-boned freckled / Irish face’. Her large green eyes were ‘Startling and nearly too pretty’ for her pretty and ‘silent’ face. ‘Baffled and loving’, she and Ted break out of themselves and into each other. A single strand of hair becomes his link, his bridge, to something he cannot forget, a world he never entered, a future that was not to be. Shirley offered him ‘a great richness’, but he was too young ‘To recognize one of those offers / Life makes only once’.17

The poem was written many years later, as part of Hughes’s long process of coming to terms with his marriage to Sylvia Plath and her death. He was always fascinated by the idea of the road not taken, the possible alternative life story. What if he had taken that passage to Australia? Or obeyed the command of the university Proctors and stayed away from the launch party of Saint Botolph’s Review? Ireland – especially the west of Ireland, where W. B. Yeats had found his home – was always his land of lost content, the place to which he dreamed of escaping. If Shirley had accepted the invitation to Spain and then married him, his soul and body would have mingled with a child of Ireland.

Shirley was the inspiration for ‘Fallgrief’s Girlfriends’, another of Ted’s poems published in Saint Botolph’s Review. The persona of Fallgrief, by this account a projection of Hughes himself, has a rather dim view of his girlfriends (‘admiration’s giddy mannequins / Lead every sense to motley’) and of sexual congress (‘insects couple as they murder each other’) until he is changed by finding ‘a woman with such wit and looks / He can brag of her in every company’.18 He was proud of Shirley. But still he was marking time, waiting for his real life to begin. Just before his twenty-fifth birthday he wrote in his journal of how he still felt like an ‘observer not yet called into the lists’. He sees himself as detached, idle, lacking in will, in need of some violent force to energise him and spark him into creative life.19

The living colossus in the pantheon of Ted Hughes and his contemporaries was Thomas Stearns Eliot. After Hughes became Poet Laureate, he delivered a lengthy toast in Eliot’s memory on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. He wrote it up under the title A Dancer to God. Like his meditations on his other poetic heroes – Shakespeare, Coleridge, Yeats – this piece is a scarcely veiled manifesto for his own work. Its theme is ‘the voice of Poetry as the voice of Eros’, which is indeed the thrust of Hughes’s own poetry. Eros: the primordial Greek god of desire, son of Aphrodite (Roman Cupid, son of Venus), embodiment of the madness of erotic love, and in Freud the term for the sex drive or life-force that is the opposite of the death drive (Eros versus Thanatos).

Even as a student, Ted was mapping out the argument that he later crystallised in what he called the ‘unified field theory’ of A Dancer to God.20 He and his friends believed that the two great English-language poets of modern times were unquestionably W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Each of them was deeply responsive to ‘the poetic Self – that other voice which in the earliest times came to the poet as a god, took possession of him, delivered the poem, then left him’. Yeats’s dabbling in the supernatural, like Hughes’s, though considered by many to be ‘at best a wilful indulgence, at worst a little bit crazy’, was of a piece with his belief in the magical spirit-force of the poetic self and with his attunement to Irish myth, legend and folklore. Yeats thus became the poet of the land and the spirit of place, the culmination of ‘the complex of autochthonous traditions in these islands’, the true Irish bard.21

Eliot, by contrast, was the poet of deracinated modernity. His ‘unique position in the history of poetry’ came from the fact that he was the first to see the ‘desacralized landscape’ of the world after the Great War, the first to give voice to ‘a new terror: the meaningless’. The Waste Land announced a rupture in the history of the world: it shores against our ruin fragments of civilisation in a time broken not only by the mass slaughter of the trenches but also by Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God and Freud’s reinvention of the poetic or second self as the dark unconscious within instead of a quasi-divine Muse descending from above. Eliot’s poetic career, Hughes suggests, followed a path from this new desolation to the redemption of Four Quartets, climaxing in the grace of the Farrar community at Little Gidding, ‘the rose-windowed, many-petalled choreography of the dance before God in an English chapel’.22 He also suggests that one of the key tensions in Eliot was that between the divine love embodied by Christ and the figure of ‘Eros/Dionysus, the androgynous, protean daemon of biological existence and the reproductive cycle’.23 Like many readers of Eliot, he links the imagery of desiccation and sterility in The Waste Land and elsewhere to some crisis of sexual frustration, to a failure of Eros concealed at the core of Eliot’s inner life.

Hughes proposes that the richest revelation of the evolution of the poetic self in its hidden life often comes from a single early poem, ‘either because the interfering ego is weakest then, or because these creative visions are very like conventional serial dreams, in that the first successful representation is likely to be a compact index of everything to follow’. In Eliot’s case, the key was to be found in the early poem ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ (‘Come in under the shadow of this gray rock, / And I will show you something different …’).24 So which early Hughes poem is the ‘compact index of everything to follow’ in his writing career?

Eros is certainly a central feature of his early work. ‘Bawdry Embraced’ goes to it, with a vengeance:

Great farmy whores, breasts bouncy more

Like buttocks, and with buttocks like

Two white sows jammed in a sty door,

Are no dunghills for Bawdry’s cock.25

But this is rollicking, playful stuff, not a hidden revelation of the inner self. Hughes himself clearly thought of ‘The Thought-Fox’ as his signature poem. It was written in 1955, sitting in bed at one o’clock in the morning after an evening in the flat of fellow-poet Thom Gunn.26 But the point of his argument about the key early creative vision is that the ‘interfering ego’ has no say in its significance. So the poet himself is the last person to be in a position to identify the key early work. ‘The Thought-Fox’ is ruled out by the presence of Hughes’s self, both in the poem and in his self-conscious mythologising of the poem when in public readings he linked it to the dream of the burnt fox.

Hughes was not a fox, he was a jaguar. An early manuscript draft of ‘The Jaguar’ survives: this is the poem that is a compact index of everything to follow. He began with a leopard, then crossed the word out. A leopard folding itself to sleep in the sun. No, he crosses it out again. Begin with the other animals: yawning ape, shrieking parrot, coiled boa-constrictor. And then the sleepers awake: excited children gather outside the cage of the pacing jaguar on a ‘short fierce fuse’ with eyes that drill as blood bangs inside its brain.27 Voracious, violent and beautiful, the jaguar has embodied the raw force of nature for a million years. Now it is caged in our so-called ‘civilisation’. Spinning on the ball of his heel, he stalks behind his bars like a prisoner serving a life sentence. This is the fate of the human spirit confined in dreary Fifties Britain. For Hughes, the role of the poet is to break the iron bars, to set free the spirit of the jaguar, to return humankind to its primal relationship with nature.

His later memory was of beginning the poem as he sat in a deep chair wearing his First World War greatcoat in the front room of Liz’s flat in Norwich Street, Cambridge, on a freezing-cold morning in January 1955. He informed his American friend Ben Sonnenberg that the previous autumn he had had a temporary job doing the washing up in the cafeteria of London Zoo in Regent’s Park. A particular jaguar was kept in a ‘transit’ cage near the kitchen window. He watched it going to and fro all day. He was reminded of seeing a jaguar in a very small cage on a family trip to Morecambe Zoo when he was about five and of how he had tried to model it in plasticine, clay and wax. Then he explained that in trying to describe the jaguar’s snarl, he thought of a dog he had once seen trying to bite a fly that had landed on its nose. So in order to suggest the intensity of the jaguar’s rage, he imagined that a fly had gone right up its nose. As he was writing a line to this effect, a bluebottle flew across the room in Norwich Street – which was very odd, given that it was midwinter and icy cold. It went straight up Ted’s nostril. He took it out and pressed it into his precious volume of Shakespeare’s complete works.28

‘That’s the magic of poetry,’ Ted said to Sonnenberg, on telling him the story in London in the early Sixties.29 He saw the incident as a classic example of what C. G. Jung called synchronicity, an idea that fascinated him. Jung and Hughes used the term for those moments of meaningful coincidence when the boundary between different worlds dissolves. A synchronicity is like a dream that offers a glimpse into an alternative reality.

Jung told of a patient who was locked in her own world, trapped in the self-created prison of her own mind. But then in a session of psychoanalysis she narrated a dream in which she was given a golden jewel in the shape of a scarab beetle. As she was recounting the dream, there was a tap on the window of Jung’s consulting room. He opened the casement and in flew a gold-green scarabaeid rose-chafer beetle. He caught it in his hand, gave it to her and said, ‘Here is your scarab.’ Her defences were broken and she became open to treatment, with Jung reporting very satisfactory results.30 For Jung, a synchronicity was a manifestation of an ‘archetypal’ pattern within what he called ‘the collective unconscious’. The individual psyche comes into constellation with a deeper reality that transcends time and place. For Hughes, the same thing happens in the moment of red-hot poetic creativity. Poet and jaguar become as one.

The more mundane reality of the making of a poem is the craft of writing and rewriting. Ted wasn’t satisfied with the ending of ‘The Jaguar’. He continued working on the poem on a visit home to Yorkshire. The original manuscript has an additional stray line about the animal’s eye being ‘blind in fire’. The first published version ends with the jaguar staring out through the bars. Far from being completed in a white heat of inspiration, stimulated by a bluebottle in Liz’s Norwich Street flat, it did not reach its perfected form for a long time.

A new issue of Chequer appeared in Cambridge with the date November 1954. Previously, Hughes had published there under a pseudonym. Now, having graduated, he put his real name to two poems. One of them was ‘The Jaguar’. It was reprinted the following year in a collection of Poetry from Cambridge 1952–4, edited by Karl Miller. So was the first version actually written before he worked at the zoo? Was the story about the bluebottle an invented memory, a playful fantasy or even a self-conscious adaptation of Jung’s story about the scarab beetle? Or was the poem a free translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘The Panther’ rather than a memory of witnessing a real caged jaguar? The imagery is remarkably similar – the animal pacing endlessly behind its bars, then achieving a momentary vision of freedom. These questions cannot be answered with any certainty. Hughes was good at covering his tracks and laying false scents. And his belief in synchronicity and archetype would lead him to say that the details do not matter, provided the poem penetrates to the core of the reality embodied by the jaguar.

The young man drinking in the sensation of claret and Gruyère in that Paris café in 1954 sensed that there was more to life than anything he had yet found in Cambridge or London, in academic work or casual labour. He was ready to burst the bars, but didn’t yet see how to do so. Something was needed to take his writing to another level. A stronger imagination was required in order to free the beast, to widen the horizon. In 1956, it came. A new ending, as powerful and sinuous as the jaguar’s footfall: the ‘stride’ a wilderness of ‘freedom’, the ‘world’ rolling ‘under the long thrust of his heel’, the horizon coming ‘Over the cage floor’.31 In a scribbled note, Ted Hughes remembered the moment of achievement: ‘Finished on Whitstead Lawn, Cambridge, with Sylvia.’32

7
Falcon Yard

Philip Hobsbaum was working for a television and film production company. He wrote a letter on his friend’s behalf to the story editor at the film company J. Arthur Rank, which had studios at Pinewood in the London suburbs. Ted duly got a job reading dozens of novels, histories and biographies, summarising the plots with a view to their potential as movie scripts. Many of his treatments survive in his notebooks: the Battle of Stalingrad, the Life of Robespierre, even James Joyce’s Ulysses.1 Summarising other people’s work made him all the more eager to find a way of devoting himself to his own writing. He kept his complete Shakespeare in the drawer of his desk in the office and got it out when the supervisor wasn’t around.

The movie people were not to his taste; he thought that they were all up their own or each other’s ‘arses’.2 He lived for the weekends. Sometimes Shirley went down to London and stayed with him in Rugby Street. Ted, convinced that his talents lay only in poetry and that he had no aptitude for prose, suggested to her that he might give her some of the plot outlines he was reviewing at Pinewood for her to turn into narrative. They would part with a farewell drink at Dirty Dick’s pub opposite Liverpool Street station before she got on the train to return to college. On other weekends, Ted would visit Cambridge and test Shirley’s ability to identify brief quotations from Marlowe and Shakespeare. He recited Dylan Thomas to her, and gave her an inscribed copy of Deaths and Entrances. He also gave her a handwritten copy of a poem inspired by her, which was later included in The Hawk in the Rain.

Shirley began to detect a subtle change in their relationship, hard to pinpoint, but impossible not to feel. Two newly arrived blonde Americans were cutting a figure in Newnham. Shirley didn’t get to know them, but she saw them weekly, waiting their turn, as she and her supervision partner left the room of Enid Welsford, author of the renowned study of The Fool: His Social and Literary History, who was taking them for the paper on the English Moralists. Shirley thought that they looked supremely all-American, so was surprised when Ted eyed them up and said that he thought they looked ‘Swedish’.3

On Saturday 25 February 1956 a launch party was held for Saint Botolph’s Review. During the day, the contributors and their friends sold copies on the streets and in cafés and pubs. Bert Wyatt-Brown, an American student at King’s, sold a copy to a fellow-American Fulbright scholar from Newnham. She raced off on her bicycle, only to seek him out again a few hours later in order to ask him where she might meet these St Botolph’s poets. She had been especially impressed by the work of Lucas Myers and Ted Hughes. If her very lightly fictionalised account of the day and night is to be believed, she crashed her bike into Bert in the market place, ‘spilling oranges, figs, and a paper packet of pink-frosted cakes’.4 He gave her an invitation to the launch party.5

They had hired a big upstairs room in Falcon Yard, just off Petty Cury in the centre of town. It belonged to the university Women’s Union (female undergraduates were excluded from the bastion of the historic Union Society, where future politicians developed their debating skills). This was one of the few places in Cambridge where you could guarantee a party with more women than men. It had a polished floor for dancing and stained-glass windows as in a church. They hauled a piano up the stairs and Joe Lyde brought along his top-class jazz men. Luke Myers danced the ‘hot-wild jitterbug’.6 His recollection was that everybody was drunk except for Ted, who liked to stay in control.

The party was in full swing when the Newnham girl arrived, in the company of Hamish Stewart, a pale Canadian from Queens’ College. She had left her essay on ‘Passion as Destiny in Racine’s Plays’, with particular reference to Phèdre, half finished in her Smith Corona typewriter.7 They were already drunk, having spent an hour slugging whisky in Miller’s bar near his college. She was wearing a red hairband, red shoes and bright-red lipstick. Her fingernails were varnished in Applecart Red.8 Her name was Sylvia Plath. She was one of the two ‘Swedish-looking’ girls who had caught Ted’s eye. Bert Wyatt-Brown was dating the other one, who lodged in the same student house: Jane Baltzell (even more blonde and in several respects a rival). Bert introduced Sylvia to the men of the hour: Luke, with his ‘dark sideburns and rumpled hair, black-and-white checked baggy pants and a loose swinging jacket’; Dan Huws, with whom she had a bone to pick because of his lukewarm review of the poems she had published in the student magazine Broadsheet; Than Minton, ‘so small and dark one would have to sit down to talk to him’; Danny Weissbort with his curly hair; and David Ross, ‘immaculate and dark’. They were all dark. She was exhilarated by this bohemian world of turtleneck sweaters and the jazz getting under her skin. She grabbed Myers from his girlfriend and danced with him, shouting about his poems, in particular his ‘Sestina of the Norse Seaman’, which took a highly complex poetic form and crashed through its rules and its line-endings.9

‘Then’, as she wrote in her diary when the morning finally came, ‘the worst happened’: ‘That big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes.’ She didn’t know him, ‘but she knew him by heart’.10 Though she did not admit so much in her diary, she had come to look for him. Always obsessed with rivals and doubles, she was determined to take him off the Newnham girl she knew he was going out with. On arriving in the room, she noticed Shirley straight away: ‘Pale, freckled, with no mouth but a pink dim distant rosebud, willowed reedy, wide-eyed to the streaming of his words … Silent, fawn-eyed. Clever.’11 She too was a ‘statue-worshipper’, putting the dark poet on a pedestal.

Shouting to be heard above the band and the crowd, Sylvia enthused to Ted about his poems:

And he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, ‘You like?’ and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and back into the next room past the smug shining blub face of dear Bert … and bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it.12

As if out on a moor in a high wind, they shouted about Dan’s review of her poems, Ted flirtatiously suggesting that his mate had only said what he did because she was beautiful. He explained that he was working in London, earning ten pounds a week, and that he had ‘obligations in the next room’ – meaning Shirley, who was not happy. Neither was Hamish, who supposedly punched Ted before the evening was out, which is hardly surprising in view of what happened next:

And I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face. His poem ‘I did it, I.’ Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists.13

For Sylvia, he was the ‘one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunk of words’. Both his spoken and his written words were ‘strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders’. She ‘screamed’ to herself, ‘oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you’.14 Her knees had gone ‘jelly-weak’ and ‘the room of the party hung in her eyes like a death’s-door camera-shot’.15 When she bit him and tasted his salty blood, he ‘shook her bang against the solid-grained substance of the wall’ and her attempt at another bite closed on thin air.16 Passion turned to embarrassment. She asked Hamish to take care of her – ‘I have been rather lousy,’ she explained.17

Shirley had entered the room at the moment of the kiss and the bite. Her friend and fellow-Newnham student Jean Gooder vividly recalled her figure framed in the doorway. Ted had his back to her as Sylvia came up to him, and his very height meant that Shirley did not see what happened.18

Ted had gone to the party with a sense of foreboding. He had cast the night’s horoscope and found it predicting ‘disastrous expense’. The launch was certainly not covered by the pitiful earnings of the magazine, but for Hughes it took the rest of his life to pay off the cost of that night:

First sight. First snapshot isolated

Unalterable, stilled in the camera’s glare.

Taller

Than ever you were again. Swaying so slender

It seemed your long, perfect, American legs

Simply went on up.19

The camera will be a key metaphor in Ted’s poems about Sylvia, an image of the gaze that fell upon their relationship. In this first snapshot, it is her bright confident American glamour and loudness that grab him and give him a glimpse of a very different world from that of Yorkshire Edna, Mancunian Liz and Liverpudlian Shirley.

His recall, in this Birthday Letters poem, may have been retrospectively shaped by the recollection of a famous photograph published in the Varsity student newspaper a couple of months later, in which ‘Sylvia Plath, American Fulbright Scholar at Newnham, reviews May Week fashions’. In one of the accompanying illustrations she wears a halter-neck swimsuit that reveals long muscular legs, honed by bicycling around Cambridge. She sent a cutting to her mother, calling herself Betty Grable. In her journals, she would compare herself to Grable in one sentence and Thomas Mann in the next.20 Glamour photography, movie stars, fashion, bright-red lipstick, sexually self-confident girls: in Fifties Cambridge, under grey skies and with memories of post-war rationing still alive, all these things were pure America. There was a vibrant but somewhat manic quality to them, as there was to this Fulbright scholar (‘full’ and ‘bright’ indeed). ‘The pure products of America’, wrote the poet William Carlos Williams, ‘go crazy.’21